09 Juni 2010

Best Free Drive Imaging Program

Clonezilla: Saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk and increases the close efficiency. The version of Clonezilla Live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. (Review)

G4U ("Ghosting for Unix"): "Not only can it clone disk to disk (any size) and copy disk partitions, it can also create and restore image files both locally and from an FTP site, if the workstation is connected to a wired network with a DCHP service." (Review)

Best Free File Manager

Dolphin: A file manager for KDE (by default) and good for other desktop environments such as GNOME as well, focusing on usability with navigation bar, view properties, split of views, dockable panels and many other useful features.

Best Free Folder Synchronization Utility

FreeFileSync
"A solid application with very clear and informative interface. The preview is very easy to understand, file collisions and deletions are readily recognizable.
If you require a sync program that can copy files that are in use or locked, it has you covered there too!" (Review)

Best Free File Archiver / Zip Utilities

File Roller and Ark, both archive managers designed respectively for GNOME and KDE desktop environments to create archives, view or extract files from archives, work as front-ends to command-line archivers supporting various file formats.

Best Free Partition Manager

GParted: "a GNOME partition editor for resizing (enlarging or shrinking), creating or deleting, moving or copying partitions on a hard disk, creating a partition table, enabling or disabling partition flags such as boot and hidden." (Review)

Parted Magic: "Employs core programs of GParted and GNU Parted to handle partitioning tasks and can be run from a live CD, DVD or USB flash drive." (Review)

TestDisk: "A console application designed for data recovery. It can be used to fix partition table, recover deleted partitions or copy files from deleted partitions." (Review)

Best Free Secure Erase Utility

Darik's Boot and Nuke: "Constructs a floppy disk or CD that will automatically wipe the hard drives of any PC that's booted from the disk, great for bulk disk cleaning and emergency." (Review)

Best Free File Encryption Utility

TrueCrypt
"TrueCrypt is a powerful, flexible and highly-effective encryption program to encrypt files, folders or entire drives. Use this seasoned, widely-used encryption program when you want an encrypted container that mounts as a virtual drive.
It's one of those freeware programs that is far superior to commercial software and its open source status allows the all-important peer review of the source code required for a trustworthy encryption program." (Review)

Best Free CD Recovery Utility

Dvdisaster: "A preventive program to create an error correction file from a good CD or DVD for data recovery." (Review)

Best Free Online Backup Sites

Dropbox: "Provides 2 GB free space for backing up and sharing your files, works similar to any other folder of your computer—after installation, simply drag and drop files/folders to Dropbox you want to backup, share or sync with other computer." (Review)

Best Free File Copy Utility

Best Free Screen Capture

Shutter
"Shutter is like a swiss army knife for all screen capture tasks in Linux. It works better than Gnome-screenshot and KDE's KSnapshot.
You can use this program to capture desktop, window, child window and rectangular area, with many plugins for resize and special effects, delay capture, activate/deactivate window border and cursor, inbuilt drawing tools, linked to external editor and auto save." (Review)

Best Free Program Launcher

Launchy: "a top product in the keyword search class, easy to understand, use, configure and extend. It has a really small memory footprint." (Review)

Best Free Desktop Search Utility

Google Desktop Search: "Google sidebar and gadgets. Just type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Indexes and searches multiple email programs." (Review)

Best Free Screen Session Recorder

Wink: "Ease of use, great flexibility and powerful annotation features, allows audio to be embedded in the presentation, etc." (Review)

recordMyDesktop: an easy-to-use and effective recorder to make screen recordings into free Ogg video format. It also offers the ability to record audio through ALSA mixer or other options. The frontend program gtk-recordMyDesktop and the ALSA mixer can be downloaded from some depositories including Ubuntu Software Center.

Best Free Wallpaper Changer

Wally
"A good wallpaper changer allows for wallpaper positions to set to centered, tiled, center tiled, centered maxpert, tiled maxpert, scaled, center auto fit or scale and crop.
The program supports features such as time intervals, selecting images from local folders or online resources, displaying images' EXIF data in system tray tool-tip, saving downloaded photos and run-time folder change detection." (Review)

Other System Tools

PySDM, a Storage Device Manager allowing for full customization of hard disk mountpoints and creation of rules for dynamic configuration of storage devices. See also Auto Mount Drives at System Startup.

Best Free Media Player

VLC Media Player
"Supports playback of most video files and DVD discs without the need to download external codec packs, including flv filescan. There are 5 different DVD region codes and VLC plays them all.
VLC also has the ability to take screenshots of your video, even while during DVD playback, a real attractive feature." (Review)

SMPlayer: "Intends to be a complete front-end for MPlayer, from basic features like playing videos, DVDs, and VCDs to more advanced features like support for MPlayer filters, remember the settings of all files you play and more."

Best Free Music Player and Organizer

Banshee: Imports, organizes, plays, and shares music using a simple yet powerful interface. Other features include rip CDs, create playlists, burn audio and mp3 CDs, support for podcasting and music recommendations.

Amarok: A powerful music player for multi platforms with an intuitive interface, supports for collection management, bookmarking, dynamic playlists, file tracking, integrated web services and more.

Best Free Media Center

XBMC
"It is truly outstanding in this category and earns the Gizmo's Top Pick title rightfully in my eyes. It played all media files I fed it with and turned out to be the most reliable product for me.
XBMC offers convincing media library features and is highly configurable with custom skins and backdrops. You will find a vast amount of plugins, skins and other goodies for it as the community around XBMC is large." (Review)

Best Free Audio / Video Format Conversion

SoundConverter: Aims to be simple to use and fast for conversion from most audio files to wav, flac, mp3, aac and ogg files, supports for extraction of the audio from videos too. (Note: Install GStreamer MP3 Encoding to enable conversion to mp3.)

Arista Transcoder: An easy-to-use converter to convert multimedia files from one format to another for playback on various devices. Supported output formats include m4v (Ipod), avi (Nokia, PDA or DVD player), mkv (computer) and mp4 (various Sony devices), depending on the device you choose.

OggConvert: A small and easy-to-use utility to convert most audio and video files to the patent-free Ogg format, and support for encoding to the Matroska container format (mkv, mka), with adjustable settings on audio and video quality for conversion.

Best Free MP3 Tag Editor

Kid3
"Edit all tags, generate tags from files or vice versa, import tags from databases, browse cover arts and lyrics from online resources, drag and drop cover art to a file, export tags, etc." Kid3 uses KDE libraries, while another package Kid3-qt is also available for installation without KDE dependacies." (Review)

Best Free CD / DVD Burning Software

Brasero: Designed for ease of use to create a traditional audio CD, data CD/DVD, video DVD or a SVCD, burn an existing CD/DVD image to disc, copy a CD/DVD to a new disc or write to an image file in ISO and other formats.

ImgBurn: "Most powerful burning application with advanced features, support for every modern optical disc from CD to Blu-Ray, more than 10 image formats, authoring rewritable discs, etc." Runs on Linux with Wine (x86 only). (Review)

Best Free Audio Editing / Audio Splitter

Audacity
"It does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler and faster to use than a lot of paid products. The interface is easy to use, allowing you to select and apply a noise profile just as easily as removing it.
The program also can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings, edit various sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together and change the speed or pitch of a recording." (Review)

Best Free Video Editor

Avidemux
"It is designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing and is my personal favorite because of its simplicity yet wide range of tools.
The software supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. It lets you do just about everything under the sun, with well documented tutorials." (Review)

OpenShot Video Editor: an open-source and non-linear video editor which is stable and friendly to use with support for many video, audio and image formats based on FFmpeg together with lots of other useful features.

Best Free Music Creator

LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio)
"As a stand alone application, one would be hard pressed to find a more comprehensively full featured and versatile free music creator than this, with so many instruments and effects to choose from.
The onboard Beat/Bassline editor removes the need for a separate drum sequencer and is a very nice touch: LMMS really is a one stop shop" (Review).

Best Free Digital Image Viewer

Best Free Digital Image Editor

GIMP: "It has lots of advanced features and can do almost everything the Photoshop can do." (Review)

Best Free High Dynamic Range (HDR) Software

Luminance HDR
Luminance HDR (previously known as Qtpfsgui) is an open source graphical user interface program and a high quality application to provide a workflow for high dynamic range imaging.
It has great tone-mapping and aligning facilities, allowing for 8, 16 and 32 bit channels and two means of manually manipulating the image.

Best Free Digital Photo Organizer

Picasa 3: "Simply sensational editing features that provide you with every function amateur photographers need." (Review)

digiKam, a digital photo management program designed to import, organize, enhance, search and export image files. With this you can add comments and tags to ablums, view and edit items, create slideshows and calendars, and share your creations.

Best Free Vector Graphics Editor

Inkscape: "A top product enhanced by an excellent user interface and the impressive set of tutorials, helps wean the user away from the world of digital images to the nodes, lines, curves and shapes that form the basis of vector editing." (Review)

Best Free Home & Office Software for Linux

Best Free Office Suite

OpenOffice 3
"Covers the basics of office document creation: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, a desktop database. It allows you to save your documents in many choices of file formats so you'll have no problem exchanging documents with MS Office." (Review)

Best Free PDF Writer

CUPS-PDF: Creates a virtual PDF printer to convert a file printed in queue to PDF and save it in a user directory.

Best Free PDF Reader

Okular: More than a viewer for pdf and other document formats including postscript, djvu, tiff, chm, dvi, xps, odf and so on. It can be used on both KDE and GNOME desktop environments, with features for annotations, highlighting, drawing lines and shapes, adding textboxes and stamps, selecting and saving a part of documents as text or in an image format.

Evince: A document viewer for pdf and other document formats including postscript, djvu, tiff and dvi, aiming to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop with a single simple application.

Best Free PDF Tools

PDF-Shuffler
"Re-arranging pages in a pdf document, or merging and splitting pdf files, would be much easier with PDF Shuffler.
After importing one or more pdf files to PDF Shuffer, you are presented with pages in thumbnails so that you can easily merge, re-order or delete the pages, or right-click a thumbnail to rotate or crop a page before exporting to a new pdf file." (Review)

Best Free Personal Finance

GnuCash: "Double entry accounting, keep tabs of budgets, create various accounts in each category, full suite of standard and customizable reports." (Review)

Best Free Personal Information Management

Calgoo: "Works very well as a stand-alone program, and it can also synchronize your data across computers. In addition to Calgoo's native calender you can synchronize Google, Outlook, 30 Boxes and generic (*.ics format) calendars." (Review)

Best Free Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox
"Firefox is safer and browses a tad faster than Internet Explorer (for Windows), very stable and more standards compliant, rich in features such as Private browsing, tabbed browsing and over 2000 free extensions (add-ons) that allow you to customize your experience. It provides the most flexibility, expandability, and features of any browser to date." (Review)

Best Free File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Client

FileZilla: "If you use a browser other than Firefox or require advanced functionality not found in FireFTP, then this is one of great standalone applications, easy to use, feature rich, includes site manager functions." (Review)

Best Free Programming Editor

Bluefish
"A lightweight yet powerful editor designed for experienced programmers and web designers, and works as a general purpose editor as well with the IDE.
Its user interface is complete with toolbars, dialogs and user-customized menus to facilitate insertion of markups and codes. Options are available for writing websites, scripts and programming codes in many programming and markup languages, with many other useful features." (Review)

Best Free Antivirus

Clam AntiVirus: "You may not need it. Some Linux users like to scan files prior to sending them to users of other operating systems, though." (Review)

Best Free Firewall

Firestarter: A complete firewall tool for Linux, allows for users to create a firewall with a wizard, open and close ports with a few clicks, completes with a real-time hit monitor.

Best Free Games for Linux

Best Free Computer Chess

PyChess
"With this program, you can play against the GNU Chess engine or lots of other chess engines, such as the Crafty engine. You can also play Internet chess by connecting to the FICS servers.
It allows for saving games in the PGN, EPD and FEN chess file formats so that you can always return to continue with the games or analyze them. It also offers opening books and other useful features including undo moves, hint and spy modes, sound and animation effects." (Review)

250 Best Free Online PC Games In One Place

Friv: "Be greeted with a full-screen of tiny screen shots for more than 250 free online PC games, all kinds of popular games and they are of various genres." (Review)

Netpotion Gamez: "A good alternative game site with minimum advertisements, features 36 tiny screen shots in each page from a library of more than 800 free online games. A click on each tiny screen shot brings you to the game selected." (Review)

Best Free Match-3 Puzzle

Frozen Bubble: "Shoot a bubble up to match and clear three or more same color bubbles from the playing field in this popular puzzle game, designed with colorful 3D rendered penguin animations and 15 stereo sound effects." (Review)

Best Free Jigsaw Puzzle

Picpuz: "Create and solve puzzles, save and open puzzle files, set tile sizes, solving a puzzle by swapping pieces or with a helpful solver." (Review)